The transmission and storage of English text in binary coded form is done in standardized ASCII code in which a set of alphanumeric characters, punctuation and other symbols and abbreviations, for example, representing beginning and end of text, carriage return and the like, are coded in eight-bit bytes. Memory storage capacity is frequently rated in terms of the number of bytes that can be stored in the memory. When it is necessary to store and access a large volume of textual information, it becomes desirable to utilize some coding scheme which compresses the amount of memory required to store the alphanumeric characters, punctuation and other symbols necessary to reproduce the textual material. While various schemes have been developed for coding textual material, such as the Huffman coding technique, such schemes have not taken full advantage of certain unique characteristics of English text while at the same time being able to handle any byte sequence as it is received.